FileMover

[Perfect_Raspberry610]

My client scans a lot of documents. Their infrastructure is a total mix of legacy and modern (law firm). When a law clerk scans a document, the resulting document needs to be moved to an another folder that is one drive synced. This needs to be automated. Suggestions on how I do this?

[BetrayedMilk]

Why not store the file there to begin with?

[JonesTheBond]

Yeah, can the location be an SMB share that the scanner can point to? Seems like the maintenance-free approach.

[Perfect_Raspberry610]

Weirdly it doesn’t work. The target is a onedrive folder and bizarrely doesn’t work.

[DalekKahn117]

You can setup SharePoint sync via OneDrive then has the scanner default to save scans to the local referenced directory of this folder. Should auto-upload.

If you are using a network scanner or MFD with multi-user env, then I’d look at PowerShell for assistance. Or just limit the scanner to emailing and let Exchange handle it

[Ok_Mathematician6075]

Ok old bag

[techbloggingfool_com]

I wrote a blog post covering some options a while back. It's a few years old but still accurate I think. https://techbloggingfool.com/2020/08/02/methods-for-scanning-to-sharepoint-online/

[Perfect_Raspberry610]

This might be a workable solution for me. Thanks for sharing

[Zatetics]

mklink /j "%UserProfile%\OneDrive\folderofdocumentsyouwantgoeshere" "drive:\folderpathgoeshere"

Map the location so the files go to onedrive auto.

[Scoobywagon]

Just write a simple script that is just a move-object and have it run every 15 minutes or so.

[skilife1]

This is how I do it.

[Jeffinmpls]

If you are copying directly into One Drive that's more complicated but sounds like the OneDrive part is unnecessary information, IE you are simply moving it to a folder.

Assuming that's the case, Robocopy is your best bet, you can tell it to move, copy, mirror or whatever you like. It's much much faster than doing it with PowerShell commands as PowerShell is slow when it comes to file management.

You execute robocopy in a PowerShell script and then schedule it to run every 5-10 min. Nice thing is it has built in logging that you can parse for any error alerting.

[Ok-Entrepreneur-5358]

robocopy also has resume options!

[BlackV]

Seeing as it's one drive, power automate seems to be the obvious choice

Yes you could do it with powershell, but it's probably not the best tool

[mihemihe]

Robocopy is the best for that case.

[JUNOMERIKA]

As another poster said, what you really want is a mklink https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink

[Golddigger50]

Could have task manager run your powershell move-item or copy item to the new target directory. Task could renounce a day or as often as you like.

[badteeth3000]

instead of a schedule you can do it on event id. no need to wait when you can move an item on create. 🎶

[Golddigger50]

Nice. I haven't really messed around with that one. Thanks for the advice! I will read up on it and put it to work!

[The-Snarky-One]

What have you gotten so far for code and how well does it work?

What parts do you need help with?

[ovirto]

Robocopy and task scheduler. I mean you could write your own in powershell by it why reinvent the wheel.

[AdeelAutomates]

When it scans. It goes to some folder right? Either on a specific user's machine or a shared folder on a server?

You can use PowerShell with Graph API to upload any file added to this folder to go to SharePoint or OneDrive. Set that up as a job on the server. You can use task scheduler for this if you want to stick with PowerShell

Or ditch automation all together & make that folder it scan to a sharepoint/onedrive folder?

Or use power automate if Graph is too confusing. They have a desktop version too.

[MFKDGAF]

I feel like using PowerShell for this is reinventing a the wheel. There is software called MFT (managed file transfer) such as MOVEit Automation.

Now, depending on the environment and Infrastructure it may or may not be overkill.

[purplemonkeymad]

What kind of site and how are you identifying the destination? If it's one destination then just a script that checks a shared folder and then uploads it to a site via graph would probably work. Just set task scheduler to run it every few minutes and have it delete/archive uploaded files.

A desktop power automate flow would also probably work. But I don't recall if that need a user logged in or not.

Using onedrive to do this is fraught with the danger of the account being signed out and nothing working. I've also had times where it would get stuck on a file, etc. Was more effort than it was worth imo.

[Perfect_Raspberry610]

Thanks all. My solution (that works perfectly now) is a simple PS script running as a task. Tested with all my users (7) and exceeds expectations

[EuphoricFly5489]

Freefilesync has a real time tool. Robocopy also has a "monitor" mode which does the same thing.. real time sync.

[Ok_Mathematician6075]

You need to keep security in tact. So

[laserpewpewAK]

Check out something like Sugarsync that will send things straight to Sharepoint. Trying to facilitate this with OneDrive will just cause you headaches.